Human Achievements

Lauren Hunter

I am afraid all the time. I knew the moment I laid eyes on your face something would happen to me. so continues this exhausting struggle to prove something between us. I moved indoors and flaked on friends. made myself a beacon, locked myself in a cocoon for some months. I thought you knew I’d always come back. I thought you knew I was just tired.

What People Are Saying

Mark Bibbins

There’s irony around the edges, but it’s not a trap. Lauren Hunter will pull you all the way through to “the very it of it” with her frightening, sharp, steady, comic, mournful, intimate poems.

Bianca Stone

From within these poems we observe a great longing bloom and walk. We reach out while we look at the world through new eyes. Human Achievements explores a contemporary landscape in human isolation, isolation from truth, love, genuine contact and vision.

Amy Lawless

Human Achievements is full of friends, aching, bleeding, feeling fine, the city, and listening. You know the right song can change everything, and can be a conduit for energy or rage? “I look the day right in the eye and tell it to go fuck itself.” The right song can also turn you into a ghost.

Ben Mirov

Lauren Hunter is an amazing dancer. Full of subtle gestures and playful turns, she's capable of deep dance floor introspection and moments of singular righteousness. She knows that dancing is about being with others as much as it is about being alone; she understands how to draw you in with a look, and how to turn mysteriously away into a private groove.

Rachel Levitsky

I feel so happy about this book of poetry by Lauren Hunter, “this unremarkable bloom” whose key words are “human” and “achievement.” At a time when human is being cast as “without anything,” Hunter’s poems remind us that efforts toward beauty, toward imperfect and beautiful thinking, is to be in an actual ‘human’ place, and that the reason one goes there is in order to love. Human Achievements and the poetry writing it will inspire in me and others will be a barricade against the rapid loss of the human I crave, the human that I’ve taken pleasure in, a human that, without the defense of poets like Lauren Hunter, is ever, in every nanosecond, accelerating toward extinction.

Inside the Book

Reviews

In her passionate debut collection, Hunter meditates on universal trials of the human experience, contending with rage, desire, and powerlessness. Alternating between verse lyrics and prose poems, she writes confessionally of everyday survival, suffocation in banality, longing for the past, and the performance of wellness. Many poems feature sense-heavy metaphors (“without two hands feel the world a bit further on fire and you have no hose and your mouth is dry you can climb with your knees”); others are more plainspoken narratives (“if I’m asleep, then I’m crying for the things I’ve lost; if I’m awake, I don’t know what they are”); and some blend those traits. Hunter displays an admirable lack of emotional restraint, though it can result in images that don’t quite work: “how about these waterfalls diluting the prairies. they say, well, stop crying. I’m impractical so I also begin blowing my nose.” Hunter excels when she conveys her thoughts with clarity while pursuing eccentric metaphors (“when the ufo crashed into our backyard pool and the other kids scattered/ but i pressed against the sliding glass door like/ and what like i’ve not chased boys around the cul-de-sac with knives”). Despite a few missteps, Hunter reveals an immense sensitivity and inner musicality that forecasts more good things to come. (May)

Laurie Sheck

At once haunted and haunting, Lauren Hunter's multi-vocal and achingly audacious mixture of poetry and prose effectively engages issues of imagination and documentation, memory and displacement, and the crucial, complex ways in which memory itself is like fire.

From the Book

Human Achievements

This morning I woke up and I only wanted to tell the truth. Like, last night was a total error in judgment; I am

mismanaging my life. I'd hire a replacement if one should apply.There are two girls inside me that have been killed. Nonviolently

snuffed out by persistent doubt and reckless influence. I am taking my laptop into the tub, I am going to write a letter. To my father, I will say,

forget the medals, I went for medals. This letter becomes a book titled Continual Failure & Disappointment; my editor will rename it,

Human Achievements. My father will say, the gold, the gold,but really delights in the calculated leap. I stay quiet and swing low.